When tone-deaf techies run the show, this is what you get

Apple's decision to police apps' use of contact data is just the
latest case in which engineers and oblivious execs have pushed the
envelope...right into a looming backlash.

Apple CEO Tim Cook at a company event last year.

(Credit:
Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

The uproar over apps that suck up people's address books without warning
is hardly surprising--unless you're one of the software engineers
working on such products.
Apple today finally said it would clamp down
by enforcing personal-data guidelines already in place. Which, in turn,
just illustrates the ongoing disconnect between tech companies and
their customers when it comes to privacy concerns.
The engineers coming up with way to use your data or gather your
location often do so with the belief that they're doing something
helpful. As the founder of Kik, an instant messaging app that used to
absorb address books as a way to get users, told my colleague Rafe Needleman, "We thought it was a cool feature of the app."
Or as Kevin Laws, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur and angel
investor, told me: "The engineers aren't evil. They're thinking, Of
course I'm not going to look at the data or use it for anything bad.
They're just focused on building cool products."
While there are of course times when companies are trying to hide
something they know would piss people off, these blowups often arise
because software engineers are, in effect, running the show. Sure, it
often works fine. But some are remarkably blind to concerns that would
seem so obvious to so many others.
A few choice examples:
Location, location, location
Apple found itself the target of outrage almost a year ago when it was
discovered that it had been recording the geographical locations of
iPhone and
iPad
customers for a year. Apple had a good reason to do this: It wanted to
better pinpoint your location, which is crucial for all sorts of apps
that its customers love.
It handled the whole thing badly, however. For one thing, it was sloppy.
The data it stored was unencrypted, and researchers took it and
suggested that it could be used to track where users were going and
where they lived. The company took a week before it explained what was it doing--an
endless stretch in crisis PR terms--and a few weeks later it released a
software update that limited such data retention to seven days.
Even after it published its explanation, though, many were outraged that
it was doing this at all. Apple doesn't use focus groups, but had it
done so it surely would have seen this problem coming. Was what they
were doing evil? Hardly. I suspect most of the people involved were
surprised that anyone was upset.

Google's Street View car

Smile, you're on Google's camera
Speaking of not doing evil, an impressive number of privacy missteps have come from the do-no-evil folks at the Googleplex.
Remember the images of Google's Street View cruising around Germany? In the spring of 2010, Google used those
cars
to build out its mapping service and location database. The problem was
that Google also sucked up the locations of personal laptops, phones,
and other Wi-Fi devices in the process, even confessing that it had spied on people's e-mails and Web-surfing activities.
Google's then CEO Eric Schmidt said it "screwed up" and suggested a Google engineer might have been at fault, not exactly a way to gain trust.
When this happened, Google was still stinging from a privacy issue with the now shuttered Google Buzz,
a failed attempt at social. The problem was that Google tied Buzz to
Gmail--nifty idea from a tech perspective--so that it automatically made
your most frequent Gmail contacts into Google Buzz followers. In one
case, a blogger complained that suddenly her abusive ex-husband was following her on Google Buzz through no choice of her own.
The outrage was immediate and loud and Google's refrain--trust us--fell
on deaf ears. Google made a number of tweaks and eventually closed down
the service.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes how Facebook will connect people to media

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)

Facebook trips all over its efforts to increase sharing
Probably the only company that could compete with Google for privacy
mishaps is Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, a believer in open everything, has
backpedaled so many times over changes in the company's complicated and ever-changing privacy policies that it's hard to keep track.
The blunder that stands out is Beacon. This one dates back to 2007, so
perhaps the now 27-year-old Zuckerberg has age as an excuse. Beacon was
an advertising program that shared your Facebook activities on
third-party partner sites and posted it all to their "news feeds,"
without warning or notification.
The whole thing was much-hyped by Zuckerberg, and it's likely he
believed--and perhaps still believes--that it was a useful way to show
people ads they would be most interested in.
When MoveOn.org criticized Beacon
as violating users' privacy, Facebook came out said the system was
innovative, not intrusive. At one point, Zuckerberg apologized for the
way the whole mess--but the bulk of his apology was about how the effort
was communicated.
As Facebook has grown up, it's made fewer missteps, but I expect we'll see some more biggies from this hotbed of innovation.